Bloomberg: How the ‘Worst’ Launch in Pharma History Spurred Opioid Surge
Excerpt:
Kapoor ripped into his underlings, calling it the “worst [expletive] launch in pharmaceutical history he’d ever seen,” said Babich, who worked with his boss for 14 years. Kapoor sought to fix it by setting up a bonus system for sales representatives that encouraged them to woo physicians to overprescribe the drug, Babich told jurors.
The system was based on an “eat-what-you-kill philosophy,’’ Babich testified. “When you sell a lot, you make a lot.’’
It apparently worked. Quarterly prescriptions for Subsys in the U.S. surged to almost 15,000 in three years, with Insys’s stock price peaking at $44.92 in 2015, compared with less than $5 two years earlier. That was enough to make Kapoor a billionaire. Since then, Insys’s share price has plunged 90 percent.
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